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Andrew Parker Interview

02.11.2016

There were times yesterday, reading Andrew Parker’s exclusive interview with the Guardian – the first such interview ever given by a serving head of MI5 – when it felt as though little had changed over the last hundred years. The way Parker spoke of the Russian threat to Britain, and how, to paraphrase his remarks, Moscow is now ‘using military means, propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks to achieve its foreign policy aims’, seemed reminiscent (except for the cyber-attacks) of the 1920s and 1930s, or indeed the 1950s, come to think of it the 1960s as well.

That element of the interview also read like a vindication from beyond the grave of Maxwell Knight’s conviction, one that would sometimes set him apart from his MI5 colleagues, that the most persistent threat to British national security came from Moscow.